How much thought do you give to losses when you enter into an investment?

Not much, I would guess. We leave that to our advisers.

As an industry, financial services don’t typically like to focus on risks or potential losses. Neither do investors.

But actually, losses are part and parcel of investment.

One person loses, somebody else gains. That’s the way it works.

As if to prove my point, last weekend’s papers were full of stories about investment losses.

Yes, it’s awful that the investors in the below cases are unlikely to get back all of their initial investment, but it is only a tragedy if they invested ALL or most of their wealth in them.

The Sunday Business Posts reports that the liquidator of CHC, a Dublin investment firm that specialised in syndicated property funds (I have written about CHC before), has been denied permission by the High Court to recoup fees from investor funds because there were insufficient company funds. Investors in the funds administered by CHC are still waiting for whatever money is left to be shared out six years after the company failed.

Brendan Investment Pan European Property (BIPEP), a property investment firm of which Eddie Hobbs was a non-Executive Director, is also in liquidation. The Sunday Business Post reported that the liquidator is investigating how the fund ended up investing in sub-prime property in Detroit when its original investor prospectus indicated that it would be investing solely in Europe. The company says there is no money left to pay back its 700 investors, many of which are located in and around me in Naas town.

It is also reported that AIB will make provision for shareholders to gift shares in the bank to charity at no cost. This would be an option for shares that are worth too little to sell; 55,000 AIB shareholders received less than 50c by way of dividends in the recent pay out.

Is there anything we can learn from these stories that would help us avoid loss?

Well, the entities in question all offered single-security type investments.

CHC bought commercial property in various European cities with investor money, bolstered by bank borrowing.

If you invested a large proportion of your available funds with CHC, your money was heavily exposed to the property crash and usually linked to one particular project. If that project fails, you lose much or all of your investment.

Brendan Investments also purchased property – both commercial and residential. This time the markets were Germany and the US, but again, both were badly hit when the property bubble burst.

AIB is a single entity. Regardless of the bank’s exposure to the property crash (yes, that again), to invest a large proportion of your available money in any one entity is to put an unwise amount of trust in one board of directors.

Do you see a pattern here?

You can minimise losses by spreading your investment across many asset classes, many entities and many markets.